Mr. Niall Cody:

The pandemic was a unique set of circumstances and it brought us into areas we are generally not involved in. I probably spent more time at meetings in the Department of Finance than normal. It started with the wage subsidy scheme.

When the economic crash came in 2008, we issued press releases about people contacting us early and engaging with us. My colleague Gerry Harrahill was Collector General at the time and went to every business engagement he could, getting people to engage with us and enter into instalment arrangements.

When the pandemic came, with the open-ended nature of it, we worried about what would happen around collection of debt. A big proportion of warehoused debt relates to November and December 2019 VAT, January and February 2020 VAT and payroll for December 2019 as well as January and February 2020. For a long time, that was the big chunk of the money. Many companies did not warehouse everything they could have warehoused. They paid off stuff they could pay.

I do not think the Government had any option. If something like the warehouse had not been introduced, I imagine I would have been brought into the Committee of Public Accounts and asked why I did not collect the money I should have collected, even though I could not have collected it. Here we had a statutory-based system and that relates to not knocking companies out of it if they are in it. It gave great certainty to business and was a great support to business.

One of my constant worries was how it would unfold at the end. The Minister for Finance was on the radio this morning. It is a huge testament to the work of taxpayers. There will always be a few who look to exploit the system. I know we have some of what I call strategic liquidations and phoenix operations but I worried about whether we would have a lot of them. Also, a momentum builds. People see this is a fair system. The 0% interest rate the Minister announced in February and that has yet to be legislated for became an added simplification of the scheme.

At the committee, I usually say these are policy matters for the Department. This one is a policy matter we had a big influence on developing but it needed legislation. It needed the Oireachtas to pass it and is something we should collectively be hugely proud of.